The Musée de l’Ancien Évêché presents the exhibition François Kollar : Nous, à l’oeuvre (Us at work), on view through September 20, 2026.
In 1931, the publishing house Horizons de France entrusted François Kollar (1904–1979), a young and then-unknown Slovak photographer who had settled in Paris in 1924, with a major photographic commission intended to promote industrial, craft, and agricultural France. Over four years he travelled the country’s roads, producing more than 10,000 photographs, 2,000 of which were published under the title La France travaille. At that time Kollar’s lens revealed a world seldom represented in images: women and men at work. In the factory, the workshop, the mine, on the docks, in the countryside, and elsewhere, the photographer chose to place them at the heart of his artistic approach, highlighting their bodies, their gestures, their skills but above all their stature and dignity. Kollar regarded them with great sensitivity. His images have striking aesthetic power, playing with original viewpoints, inventive framing, and a taste for composition. Unanimously praised, this photographic work enjoyed tremendous success and secured the photographer’s fame. A photographic humanism attested to by the roughly 130 photographs presented in this exhibition, drawn from the François Kollar holdings relating to La France travaille, kept at the Forney Library in Paris. The exhibition Nous, à l’œuvre revisits this collection through an original and sensitive approach, showing the artistic interest of this reportage as well as its exceptional place in our understanding of the working world in the 1930s.
François Kollar : Nous, à l’oeuvre
Until September 20, 2026
Musée de l’Ancien Évêché
2, rue Très-Cloîtres
38 000 Grenoble
04 76 03 15 25
www.musees.isere.fr
